Puget Sound Science-Governance Partnerships for Integrating Ecosystem Modeling into Local and Regional-Scale Restoration Planning
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Mounting population and climatic pressures are decreasing the capacity of many coastal watersheds and estuaries to provide services needed for human health and well-being – clean drinking water, food and fiber, thriving marine food webs, and many other economic, social and health benefits. The Puget Sound National Estuary in Washington State is a prime example of this global problem and search for solutions. This webinar describes Puget Sound science-governance partnerships aimed at bringing together ecosystem scientists and restoration planners representing communities, tribes, and state and federal agencies. This partnership aims to more tightly integrate ecosystem service concepts and modeling into coastal watershed and estuarine restoration planning and management. For example, local planners and managers face the difficult challenge of extrapolating impacts of their restoration actions over time and space and across jurisdictional boundaries. Similarly, ecosystem scientists find it difficult to accurately model large coastal watersheds such as Puget Sound (>31,000 km2) without the detailed knowledge that local planners and managers possess. Therefore, our partnership seeks to integrate the expertise of these groups with a state-of-the-art ecosystem modeling framework to help planners visualize how effects of their decisions will propagate downstream with far reaching benefits and tradeoffs for terrestrial and marine ecosystem services. We briefly describe this framework and provide examples of our science-governance applications within Puget Sound’s terrestrial-marine ecosystem.